Verano Sustainable Development

Verano is a planned community utilizing the SmartCode, LEED for New Development, and the Congress for New Urbanism’s approach to transects. As we looked at the lists of procedures, we realized that the very concept of life regenerating itself was not possible; the cycles were not there. We intervened by deciding to take what is required by the SmartCode and LEED into a cyclical rather than a linear list.

We utilized the ecoBalance framework’s connection of water, energy, and food at each transect scale, taking the attitude that when something was unlikely to balance at one scalar level, residuals could be taken into account at the next level. Interestingly, we also realized that to fill the gaps in the list at each scale, we needed an intervention that could be supportive of green businesses. We created not only cycles within cycles, in a symbiosis between buildings and landscape, but also took into account the business angle. We labelled each intervention as a source or resource business with the expectation that monetary and ecological cycles were working in consort. This also allowed us to use icons as an accounting procedure, labelling businesses and how they connect to each other in multiple levels of flow. Thus, we could diagram the industrial ecology of a business overlayed into the economy and workings of a community built with the accompanying footprints.